I was curious about the life span of the TC's since I remember that the first one I had was a model with a lot of problems and folks were seeing fails at 18 months or so. My current one has been fine but for an issue a year ago when there was an issue with my laptop booting up and TC was also unable to do a full restore (after that I reset it). But since then it's all been OK.

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I was curious about the life span of the TC's since I remember that the first one I had was a model with a lot of problems and folks were seeing fails at 18 months or so. My current one has been fine but for an issue a year ago when there was an issue with my laptop booting up and TC was also unable to do a full restore (after that I reset it). But since then it's all been OK.

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I remember those early models were dying all over the place. There was even a web site someone started that tracked the failures. It seems like Apple figured out the weak point since then because I have not seen any widespread reports of failures. The new tower model with AC wireless is a complete redesign, so hopefully we are past this.

I have the new tower AC Time Capsule since they first came out and I am happy with it.

My guess is that a 2011 time capsule is good for another couple of years. Just last week I retired a 2008 TC (original model) that's been handling hourly backups for six solid years. It still works fine today, but I wanted to retire it before it fails.

That said, if you do buy a new TC you can still keep the old one on your network and have your Mac alternately backup to each one. First backup goes to TC-Old, 2nd backup goes to TC-New, 3rd backup goes to TC-Old, 4th to TC-New, etc.

It means that if one TC dies and you don't notice it (or if it's disk is corrupted) the other TC will still have an up-to-date backup.

Thanks. I think if I retire the old one I'll just hold on to it in case something happens to the new one - I too want to replace the current one before it fails tho I don't know the lifespan of the one I have.

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